Every year, many students from engineering colleges all over India secure handsome salary packages with well-known MNCs through campus placements. But IIIT-ian Aditya Paliwal chose a different route to land a pay package of Rs 1.2 crore per annum with Google.
After completing his MTech from International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B), Paliwal began looking for a job, though not too ardently. Aditya told TNM,
“I never worried about getting a job too much. I knew I would always have one year at the end of the course to prepare to refocus on employment tests. So the focus was mostly on learning as many things as possible and meeting interesting people and ideas. The goal was to develop new interests and master a few.”
He came across the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, which is an annual programming competition among universities all over the world — a sort of Olympics for programming. This year’s edition saw the participation of over 50,000 students from 111 countries and 3,098 universities.
At the contest, Aditya cleared the preliminary round of the selection process based on interviews and later, beat over 6,000 students to feature as one of the 50 finalists at the international collegiate. Out of those 50 finalists, 5 are Indians who landed a job at Google’s AI Research wing.
He told TOI,
“I got the offer in March and I was waiting for it. I’m really happy and I hope to learn as many things I can during my tenure at Google.”
The 22-year-old coder from Mumbai started coding when he was in Class 8 but his interest remained passive until he entered college. In college, programming became his active interest. The field of study that caught his eye was Artificial Intelligence, which Paliwal felt is rapidly progressing and can be harnessed to advance technologies in the future.
But as of now, Paliwal’s current goal remains learning as much as he can over the period of next two years at New York.
